Hmm. It’s been an interesting week. I’ve tried a few new things some of which have worked out other haven’t worked. With Tuesday group when I did a software demo in the morning I did a screen capture of that. Which has already been useful because the student that didn’t get to class until 12:00 could watch it in the afternoon. What I’m having a bit more of a problems with is getting it up online in a nice streaming format. Part of the problem is I cann’t work with the windows media file on my MAC so I can get the into flash so I can use the flash video player stuff.
I talked quickly to Steve Brain about streaming video on the TAFE network and he has got Flash Communication Server up and running internally at TAFE and he has give me his Flash file to play with. He has also come to the conclusion that Flash Video and Windows Media files might be the best solution at the moment.
With the Tuesday groups that are working the best are the group that is physically working close to each other. Next week I will encourage people to sit close to their team members. The teams are not quite working in the way I expected there is not a lot dialogue or actual group work. Also in the timing for the project I didn’t account for the longer time need to talk about the idea’s thru. I sort of thought group work would make the project quicker to do, but in actual fact it might make it slower to do.
With the Thursday group the day was a bit chaotic because I spent the morning at the Merrill video conference. In afternoon I had my first go of using learning plans with student, which some of them where worried by. But it was great to talk to everyone about where their skills where and how they thought it might be best to gain skills in that area. I think this is going to work. One thing I need to change is some students put done “other” and the wrote learning from Robin. Which I thought was quite funny. They didn’t realise that Software Demo’s and Coaching where “Robin teaching us”. Hmm
Notes on the Merrill videoconference.
This was interesting, it was great to see him used examples that related to software training. It confirmed what thought, you help students do the project using the software not help the students learn the software. In many ways thing such as problem based learning, and real life task are things I’m already doing. But I realised that I’m still spending some time telling students what they need to learn eg my powerpoint presentations.
The big thing I’m going to change is I’m going to have a series of project/problems that build the student up towards the final real task. In the past I’ve just had that finally real task and tried to show the students how to do that. The students need more of a more structured introduction to the project. I’ll start this next week with the video project.
The other thing that the videoconference confirmed was my belief that I shouldn’t be using multiple-choice questions to check for underpinning knowledge, and they my approach of software demos being about doing the problem should work.
Urls: http://www.id2.usu.edu:16080/MDavidMerrill/